Saturday, 13 June 2009

The people of the street possess a weird freedomFrom the fading vestiges of the American Dream,That straitjacket worn much as the suit of armor Of the knight who, glimpsing his reflection, pitchedHeadfirst into the moat and was not again seen,Dragged under by the weight of his own protectionFrom what in the end he would never even know.Self knowledge being the last property to come,The first to go. Another cold night, body pain, slowProgress between Vine and Safeway, paused at The corner hailed by Dave the Irishman, now shornOf his beloved and badly abused canine companionJezebel, sequestered in the poundFor the nth time a month ago, ne'er to returnAs Dave could not pay the fee this time round. Dave is banned on Shattuck. Clustered upWith the tall haunted Tom Waits lookalike guyAnd a Latin dude with a handheld video player,Carrying a formidable knife. Dave profferedA Foster's in a paper bag, the invisibilizing Container which shields crime from police eyes.The night deepened. Some drunken high schoolKids mocked us from the bus stop, falling over.Unconcerned, Dave cartwheeled round the corner.A couple of gangsters sidled past casting Meaningful glances at the video playerAnd the Latin dude's hand moved to the pocketWith the knife. At the stoplight a well dressedCouple stepping carefully around us, compressingThe distance between their four hundred Dollar Chez Panisse dinner and their parkedRide to as few tiny cautious steps as possible,Not saying a word, stiff with body armament,And then traffic flowed with the changing of the light.

Don McCullin's Spitalfields Originals would fit right into the environment of this poem, scrunched in a defensive fetal curl on a pallet in a shop doorway, or, if marginally more fortunate, on a bit of tarp under a bush. Though Don's outsiders are generally older. Here on these hard streets one now moves among the rejected and ejected of all ages, all races. The Great Equalizer: simply being Left Out. For them, as Tom says, if life is to be found at all, it must be eked out drop by drop from within that neutralizing brown paper container.

Often people don't want to let any perceived relative misfortune get too close. Whether it touches off guilt, awkwardness, fear of being asked to give or do something about it, having something to lose putting one at an unfamiliar, fleeting disadvantage vs. those with nothing to lose, or just not wanting to find any kind of commonality that might induce the dreaded fate-tempting, taboo realization that it could happen to them, too. Better or safer to just keep it at the distance of "other."

Tom, thanks for this. The "fading vestiges" return as psychotic patterns among the still-not-entirely knocked out. I imagine the hunt will be on soon for scapegoats. Thanks for keeping your ear to the ground--and your voice insightful and brilliant as ever.

Dale--Get you about the return. No need for Nimrod, the scapegoat is already vulnerable and exposed, dwelling, after a fashion, just beyond our social frontiers, much as Isaiah had it. "Surely he hath borne our Griefs and carried our Sorrows; yet did we esteem him stricken, smitten of GOD and afflicted." Though few of The People are in fact so well groomed as Holman Hunt's sad looking Best-of-Show The Scapegoat

Zeph and Annie have the aversion thing right surely. As the population numbers of the "other" (lower) worlds swell visibly and daily, the tension's palpable; a strange caste-distancing process is bred of the evident anxiety of imaginal reversal--fear lest "they" become "us," and thus vice versa. I'll Be Your Mirror. The world pictured in The People is one into which it proves all too easy to stumble and fall, and who will be able to tell us and them apart, when it comes Judgment Day.

But if not now, when. And after that, what...

There are certain songs that inveigle their way into the ancient cranium when nothing much else is there (this is not uncommon) which always remind me to try to remember to forget. E.g. this Lowell George/Martin Kibbee Little Feat classic, covered by some other old soldiers here, it's becoming common knowledge it's so very

Dear Tom,In our land autonomy trumpsbeneficence. Many of the homelessare mentally ill. Locally there area few residential group homes forpeople like these who are willingto go or are court ordered. Theyare free to wander though. Theadvocacy groups for the mentally illinsist on that. So if one of them walks into oncoming traffic on the interstate perhaps it's freedomto blame. Now if the poets introduced youg doctors to the ecstacyof beauty and truth in a morecommon fashion they might be betterat healing these unfortunates.It's not exactly there but fortunego you and I but there is alwayssome truth in that in that anyonecan become or be made to becomepsychotic.Sincerely,Elmo St. Rose